The CRU graph. Note that it is calibrated in tenths of a degree Celsius and that even that tiny amount of warming started long before the late 20th century. The horizontal line is totally arbitrary, just a visual trick. The whole graph would be a horizontal line if it were calibrated in whole degrees -- thus showing ZERO warming

Thursday, October 09, 2014

Big woe! The heat's not in the oceans either

The deep ocean may not be hiding heat after all, raising new questions about why global warming appears to have slowed in recent years, said the US space agency on Monday.

Scientists have noticed that while greenhouse gases have continued to mount in the first part of the 21st century, global average surface air temperatures have stopped rising along with them, said Nasa.

Some studies have suggested that heat is being absorbed temporarily by the deep seas, and that this so-called global warming hiatus is a temporary trend.

But latest data from satellite and direct ocean temperature measurements from 2005 to 2013 "found the ocean abyss below 1 995m has not warmed measurably," Nasa said in a statement.

The findings present a new puzzle to scientists, but co-author Josh Willis of Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) said the reality of climate change is not being thrown into doubt. "The sea level is still rising," said Willis. "We're just trying to understand the nitty-gritty details."

A separate study in August in the journal Science said the apparent slowdown in the Earth's surface warming in the last 15 years could be due to that heat being trapped in the deep Atlantic and Southern Ocean.

But the Nasa researchers said their approach, described in the journal Nature Climate Change, is the first to test the idea using satellite observations, as well as direct temperature measurements of the upper ocean.

"The deep parts of the ocean are harder to measure," said researcher William Llovel of Nasa JPL. "The combination of satellite and direct temperature data gives us a glimpse of how much sea level rise is due to deep warming. The answer is - not much."

Antarctic sea ice hits record levels as it reaches 20 MILLION square kilometers for first time since records began in 1979

But ice is caused by warming, as any Warmist will tell you -- in one of the amazing mental gymnastics that Leftists specialize in. A bit of light fisking below

Sea ice surrounding Antarctica has reached a new record high. Nasa says it now covers more of the southern oceans than it has since scientists began a long-term satellite record to map sea ice extent in the late 1970s.

They say that even though Antarctic sea ice has been increasing, 'the planet as a whole is doing what was expected in terms of warming.' [They lie. There is no warming going on]

Since the late 1970s, the Arctic has lost an average of 20,800 square miles (53,900 square kilometers) of ice a year; the Antarctic has gained an average of 7,300 square miles (18,900 sq km).

On Sept. 19 this year, for the first time ever since 1979, Antarctic sea ice extent exceeded 7.72 million square miles (20 million square kilometers), according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

The single-day maximum extent this year was reached on Sept. 20, according to NSIDC data, when the sea ice covered 7.78 million square miles (20.14 million square kilometers).

The upward trend in the Antarctic, however, is only about a third of the magnitude of the rapid loss of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean.

The new Antarctic sea ice record reflects the diversity and complexity of Earth's environments, said NASA researchers.

Claire Parkinson, a senior scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, has referred to changes in sea ice coverage as a microcosm of global climate change.

Just as the temperatures in some regions of the planet are colder than average, even in our warming world, Antarctic sea ice has been increasing and bucking the overall trend of ice loss.

'The planet as a whole is doing what was expected in terms of warming.

'Sea ice as a whole is decreasing as expected, but just like with global warming, not every location with sea ice will have a downward trend in ice extent,' Parkinson said.

Since the late 1970s, the Arctic has lost an average of 20,800 square miles (53,900 square kilometers) of ice a year; the Antarctic has gained an average of 7,300 square miles (18,900 sq km). [But sea ice extent in the Arctic was 1.65 million square kilometers (637,000 square miles) ABOVE the record low monthly average for September that occurred in 2012].

A warming climate changes weather patterns, said Walt Meier, a research scientist at Goddard. Sometimes those weather patterns will bring cooler air to some areas.

And in the Antarctic, where sea ice circles the continent and covers such a large area, it doesn't take that much additional ice extent to set a new record.

'Part of it is just the geography and geometry. With no northern barrier around the whole perimeter of the ice, the ice can easily expand if conditions are favorable,' he said.

Researchers are investigating a number of other possible explanations as well. One clue, Parkinson said, could be found around the Antarctic Peninsula – a finger of land stretching up toward South America.

There, the temperatures are warming, and in the Bellingshausen Sea just to the west of the peninsula the sea ice is shrinking. [Due to volcanic activity]

Beyond the Bellingshausen Sea and past the Amundsen Sea, lies the Ross Sea – where much of the sea ice growth is occurring.

That suggests that a low-pressure system centered in the Amundsen Sea could be intensifying or becoming more frequent in the area, she said – changing the wind patterns and circulating warm air over the peninsula, while sweeping cold air from the Antarctic continent over the Ross Sea.

This, and other wind and lower atmospheric pattern changes, could be influenced by the ozone hole higher up in the atmosphere – a possibility that has received scientific attention in the past several years, Parkinson said.

'The winds really play a big role,' Meier said.

Melting ice on the edges of the Antarctic continent could also be leading to more fresh, just-above-freezing water, which makes refreezing into sea ice easier, Parkinson said.

Or changes in water circulation patterns, bringing colder waters up to the surface around the landmass, could help grow more ice.

Snowfall could be a factor as well, Meier said.

Snow landing on thin ice can actually push the thin ice below the water, which then allows cold ocean water to seep up through the ice and flood the snow – leading to a slushy mixture that freezes in the cold atmosphere and adds to the thickness of the ice. This new, thicker ice would be more resilient to melting.

'There hasn't been one explanation yet that I'd say has become a consensus, where people say, 'We've nailed it, this is why it's happening,' Parkinson said.

For Antarctica, key variables include the atmospheric and oceanic conditions, as well as the effects of an icy land surface, changing atmospheric chemistry, the ozone hole, months of darkness and more.

'Its really not surprising to people in the climate field that not every location on the face of Earth is acting as expected – it would be amazing if everything did,' Parkinson said.

'The Antarctic sea ice is one of those areas where things have not gone entirely as expected.[Understatement] 'So it's natural for scientists to ask, 'OK, this isn't what we expected, now how can we explain it?'

An amusing admission from a died-in-the-wool Warmist highlighted below

A temperature goal set by almost 200 governments as the limit for global warming is a poor guide to the planet's health and should be ditched, a study said on Wednesday.

The world's environment ministers agreed in 2010 to cap a rise in average surface temperatures at 2°C above pre-industrial times as the yardstick to avoid more floods, heat waves, droughts and rising sea levels.

"Politically and scientifically, the 2°C goal is wrong-headed", David Victor and Charles Kennel, both professors at the University of California in San Diego, wrote in the Nature article entitled "Ditch the 2°C Warming Goal".

Among objections, they said the goal was "effectively unachievable" because of rising greenhouse gas emissions, led in recent years by China's strong economic growth.

And they said the target was out of line with recent trends. Temperatures have risen about 0.85°C since about 1900 but have been virtually flat since about 1998 despite higher emissions from factories, power plants and cars.

They said that blood pressure, heart rate or body mass were all vital signs of health for a person, not just temperature. "A similar strategy is now needed for the planet", they wrote.

The study urged a shift to other yardsticks to gauge the planet's health, such as concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere or changes in the heat content of the oceans.

Some other scientists said the 2°C target was still the best goal to guide UN talks on a deal to limit climate change, due to be agreed by governments in late 2015 at a summit in Paris.

He said that a shift to tracking carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere, for instance, would not help because no one knows exactly how far rising carbon concentrations affect temperatures.

And he said that 1998 was an exceptionally hot year, warmed by a powerful El Nino event in the Pacific Ocean. The period since then was not typical of long-term trends.

A German group of experts, climate analytics, also defended the 2°C goal. "Whilst no one is in doubt about the difficulty of limiting warming below 2°C, it is incorrect to claim that achieving this goal is infeasible", they wrote.

The UN's panel of climate experts said in March that it was still possible to keep temperatures below 2°C at a moderate annual cost of about 0.06 percent of economic output.

The panel says it is at least 95% probable that man-made greenhouse gas emissions, rather than natural swings in the climate system, are the main cause of global warming since 1950.

The Broadway critics are raving over “Love Letters,” starring Mia Farrow and Brian Dennehy — particularly over Farrow. The New York Times says her “remarkable performance . . . casts a heartbreaking spell.”

Several thousand miles away, however, people in Ecuador are raving about another Mia Farrow performance this year — one they found “heartbreaking,” but not in a good way.

And Farrow is trying desperately to ignore these reviews.

This Farrow role was billed as a trip to “show her support for indigenous people” in a massive lawsuit that accused the US oil company Chevron of polluting the jungle and poisoning locals.

The highlight of the dramatic visit featured Farrow reaching into the ground and, with world media present, holding up a dirty, oil-drenched hand.

The Farrow visit was part of a campaign centered on an Ecuadorian court ruling that found against Chevron and ordered it to pay more than $9 billion in compensation, the largest civil penalty in history.

But, as Farrow knows from her other performances, there is often a final twist that can turn the story on its head. And so it is with her Ecuadorian jaunt and the Chevron suit.

A few months ago, a New York court found the Chevron judgment was obtained by fraud and bribery — mostly masterminded by Manhattan-based attorney Steven Donziger. The fraud was so outrageous that the judge found the Ecuadorian lawsuit was the equivalent of organized crime extorting money from Chevron.

The RICO laws, normally used against organized crime, are now being applied to Donziger and his associates.

The case was so corrupt, it’s impossible to list here all the outrages.

Basically the court found that the plaintiffs had bribed everyone in Ecuador from “independent” experts to the judges, and also corrupted or lied to US lawyers and scientific groups. (You can read all the inglorious details in Paul Barrett’s recent book, “Law of the Jungle.”)

But none of this sleaze had rubbed off on Mia Farrow. At worst, she seemed a naïve pawn — an artist who’d been altruistically trying to help peasants against the rich and powerful.

That is, until news broke that the Ecuadorian government had secretly paid her $188,000 to go there and hype the case against Chevron. Her “oily hand seen around the world” may have been the most lucrative gig of her acting career.

The truth leaked after the US company that acted as the conduit for the payment was forced (under fear of prosecution) to disclose that it had been secretly working for the Ecuadorian state.

The average salary in Ecuador is around $300 a month; Farrow’s $188,000 payday is an absolute fortune there. So the response from journalists and citizens on social media has been excoriating.

The United Mine Workers of America came to Washington on Tuesday with a message for the Obama administration: We will not be forgotten.

The union miners, who came by bus from Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia, held a rally outside the Environmental Protection Agency's headquarters in protest of new regulations on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants that the agency proposed in June. The rules are part of the Obama administration's plan to curb the greenhouse gas emissions that are causing the planet to heat up.

Members of the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers also attended the rally.

"We are fighting for our livelihood," James Gibbs, an at-large vice president at UMWA, told the crowd. "We have to let the president know, we need to let both parties know that we will support candidates that support us."

Organizers said about 700 people made it to Washington for the protest, and another 50 or so were on a bus that arrived late. They carried signs that read "EPA Rules Destroy Good Jobs" and "EPA Rules Put Seniors At Risk," and some wore shirts that said "Stop The War On Coal." UMWA leaders expressed frustration that the union had worked on behalf of progressive causes like improved labor laws and fair wages, and had committed money and manpower to elect Obama in 2008. (The group did not endorse either candidate in 2012.)

"We fought for those progressive causes, and there are people today in the progressive movement who have forgotten us," Daniel Kane, UMWA's secretary-treasurer, told the gathered crowd. "If you try to foist this devastation on Appalachia, on our brothers and sisters, we will remember."

UMWA President Cecil Roberts accused the EPA of essentially passing a new "law" without the approval of Congress. "What's going on now is the EPA is passing laws, and we all have to abide by them," said Roberts. "These rules could not pass a vote in the United States Congress."

"These are the best jobs in Appalachia," said Roberts. "No bureaucrat has the right to do this." He also argued that the U.S. should not go forward with emissions regulations while countries like China don't have similar limits in place.

Roberts is probably right that Congress, as it is currently constituted, could not pass a new law to deal specifically with greenhouse gas emissions. The House passed such a law in 2009, when Democrats were in control, but it never passed in the Senate.

Instead, the new rules were issued under the Clean Air Act of 1970 in response to a Supreme Court ruling in 2007 that determined that EPA had the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the existing law. Under the draft rules, the EPA would set an emissions limit for each state based on its energy mix, and each state would develop its own plan to meet those standards.

While the number of coal-mining jobs has declined steeply in recent decades, those trends were underway before the EPA drafted its new regulations. Mechanization of mining operations and the shift from underground to surface mining operations have been major factors, as has the lower price of natural gas. A recent report from the liberal Center for American Progress looked at the economic factors affecting coal jobs, beyond EPA's new rules.

But many of the miners at Tuesday's rally blamed the EPA rules for continued job losses. "They have too much power, that's what I think," Tom Powell, a 59-year-old retired underground miner from Crooksville, Ohio, told The Huffington Post.

Mike Mallernee, a 69-year-old retired miner from the UMWA's Local 1188 in Zanesville, Ohio, left home at 3 a.m. to attend the rally. He said he was there to support the union, and because he felt the EPA rules were "too strict." "If you shut down all the coal-fired power plants now, what would you use for electricity in the U.S.?" said Mallernee.

The EPA defended its new rules Tuesday, arguing that coal will not be eliminated from the U.S. electricity sector. "Coal will remain a critical part of America's energy mix for the foreseeable future. In 2030, it will represent a third of our nations' energy mix," said EPA press secretary Liz Purchia in a statement to HuffPost. "EPA's carbon pollution proposal provides each state with enormous flexibility in determining how to meet its pollution reduction goals, and does not mandate the retirement of any coal plants."

Purchia said that many retirements for coal-fired power plants are already happening, not because of the new rules, but "because of ongoing economics -- regardless of this plan, largely as a result of aging equipment and market forces, including greater energy efficiency and cheap natural gas." She added that the average U.S. coal plant is 42 years old, and plants have adapted to pollution limits in the past by finding "new ways to innovate."

The EPA said it has already received more than 1 million comments on the proposed rules, and recently pushed back the deadline for comments to Dec. 1 in order to give parties more time to weigh in.

The article below by Carl Brehmer is very comprehensive so is rather long. Carl makes all his points very well however so I have reproduced it in full

“Greenhouse gases” have a profound effect on the climate as can be seen in every climate system that has a high concentration of water vapor (H2O) and carbon dioxide (CO2)—the two “most potent ‘greenhouse gases’”. Here are some photos:

The climate change that water vapor brings, far from being catastrophic, is quite the opposite. Water vapor brings an otherwise dead biosphere to life and makes it lush and green and, as we will see, even cools it down somewhat. What about carbon dioxide? Take a look:

It is such a scientific certainty that higher concentrations of carbon dioxide promote robust plant growth that commercial gardeners pump carbon dioxide into their greenhouses up to levels > 3 times higher than is currently present in the open atmosphere.

“In general, carbon dioxide supplementation of 1,000 ppm during the day when vents are closed is recommended [to bring the total concentration up to 1,300.]”Carbon Dioxide In Greenhouses, Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs.

If we were to look at pictures that compare the Arabian Desert to Bangladesh or the Nairobi Desert to the Congo the result would be the same. It is incontrovertible that water vapor and carbon dioxide bring life into a climate system as can be seen in the lush eco-systems of New Zealand, Bangladesh and the Congo compared to the deserts in Nevada, Saudi Arabia and Nairobi and it is no mystery as to why.

Water vapor in high enough concentrations condenses into clouds, which produce rain that drenches the soil. Plants, using the sun’s energy, pull carbon dioxide out of the air and water out of the soil to create carbohydrates and oxygen—the food that animals eat and the air that they breathe.

Photosynthesis:

6CO2 + 6H2O +(Sun)light energy -----> C6H12O6 + 6O2

Where: CO2 = carbon dioxide

H2O = water

C6H12O6 = carbohydrate

O2 = oxygen

The “carbo” in carbohydrate comes from the word “carbon”—the base element of the food chain. That is why the flora and fauna of the eco-system of which we are a part are called “carbon-based” life forms. In Mass. vs. EPA (2007) the US Supreme Court bizarrely decided to call carbon dioxide—the foundation of all organic life—a pollutant!

The fact is, what makes a desert devoid of abundant life is not its temperature; rather it is a lack of a sufficient quantity of water vapor—referred to by the IPCC in its AR5 report as “the primary greenhouse gas in the Earth’s atmosphere.” Without sufficient water vapor in the air clouds cannot form and without clouds there is no rain.

Here is a picture of the Raven Golf Course in Phoenix, Arizona. To compensate for the Arizona desert’s lack of the “greenhouse gas” called water vapor and the consequent inadequate rainfall, the golf course installed an elaborate sprinkler system. As you can see, with adequate water available the temperature becomes irrelevant and the desert comes alive.

Of course you already know all of this because you learned about photosynthesis in elementary school and you have experience the life-giving affect of humidity within your own climate system.

You already know that without sufficient water vapor and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere the entire land-based Eco-system of the Earth would die—without water vapor and carbon dioxide all plant life would die and without plant produced carbohydrates to eat and plant produced oxygen to breathe all animal life would die as well.

In the face of the incontrovertible truth that these two potent “greenhouse gases” bring profoundly beneficial changes to climate systems worldwide, one is puzzled by the conclusion drawn by the IPCC in its recent AR5 report.

On the IPCC web site there is a video called Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis and in this video Thomas Stocker, a climate modeler and Co-Chair of IPCC Working Group I, makes this odd statement, “ . . . continued ‘greenhouse gas’ emissions cause further climate change . . . Therefore we conclude limiting climate change requires substantial and sustained reductions in “greenhouse gas” emissions.” Based on the actual “climate change” that water vapor and carbon dioxide cause in the real world what he is actually saying is, “ . . . continued ‘greenhouse gas’ emissions cause further [proliferation of plant and animal life] . . . Therefore we conclude limiting [this proliferation] requires substantial and sustained reductions in [the] emission [of the airborne plant fertilizer carbon dioxide in the hopes that this will reduce the amount of water vapor that is available for photosynthesis].”

Why on Earth would anyone want to limit the proliferation of plant and animal life? How can the IPCC on the one hand claim to be concerned about the Earth’s biosphere yet on the other hand intend to limit the concentration of the two gases that give it life, i.e., carbon dioxide and water vapor?

If you dig into the AR5 report you find that the premise upon which this life-destroying policy recommendation is based is the notion that these “greenhouse gases” threaten to cause catastrophic global warming of which 66-75% is projected to come from water vapor. “Water vapour is the primary greenhouse gas in the Earth’s atmosphere. The contribution of water vapour to the natural greenhouse effect relative to that of carbon dioxide (CO2) depends on the accounting method, but can be considered to be approximately two to three times greater.” (AR5 chapter 8, FAQ 8.1)

There is simply no way around the fact that all of the IPCC’s prophecies of doom about the coming climate catastrophe are dependent upon the warming that they expect to happen because of an increase in global humidity, because of what they call “positive water vapor feedback”. So, when you hear a prediction that the Earth’s temperature might be 4 °C warmer by the end of the 21st century, know that 3 °C of that projected warming is expected to be the doing of humidity, i.e., water vapor. They are quite literally asserting that higher levels of global humidity will cause irreparable damage to the Earth’s ecosystems along with “substantial species extinction!” “Global climate change risks are high to very high . . . and include . . . substantial species extinction.” IPCC, AR5

Can one conceive of any notion that is more disconnected from reality than the idea that an increase in global humidity will cause “substantial species extinction” when one can see with ones own eyes that those climate systems that are the most humid are also the climate systems that have the most abundant and diverse life?

Let’s take a look at the effect that humidity actually has on the global climate systems:

This is a picture of the correlation that exists between high humidity and abundant life within the various climate systems around the globe. Where ever the humidity is high life flourishes in abundant diversity. Wherever the humidity is low life struggles to exist. The IPCC would have you not believe your own eyes, but rather believe them when they tell you that higher global humidity levels, “the primary greenhouse gas in the Earth’s atmosphere,” threatens to kill almost everything unless we do what they say.

And what is it that they say we must do? Primarily abandon using fire as an energy source, i.e. stop “burning” hydrocarbons, because doing so produces the potent airborne plant fertilizer called carbon dioxide. They have issued this global command even though they acknowledge “there is a wide range of possible adverse side-effects . . . from climate policy that have not been well-quantified.” IPCC, AR5

Imagine that!

* Your impoverishment is just a “side-effect” of their climate policy.

* Your loss of dependable, low cost electricity is just a “side-effect” of their climate policy.

* Your loss of independent travel in a private vehicle is just a “side-effect” of their climate policy.

* Your loss of plentiful food to eat is just a “side-effect” of their climate policy (most agricultural production in the world today requires the use of hydrocarbon energy; beyond that enough food is currently being converted to biofuels to feed tens of millions of people each year.)

* Your inability to continue heating your home in the winter and air-conditioning it in the summer is just a “side-effect” of their climate policy.

* Your loss of dependable modern health care is just a “side-effect” of their climate policy (modern hospitals are dependant upon the stable electrical grid that burning hydrocarbons provide.)

* Therefore, the likelihood that you will die younger is just a “side-effect” of their climate policy.

This, of course, would be just all right with some of the leading advocates of the IPCC’s “climate policy”.

Ted Turner, ”There are too many people; that's why we have global warming.”

David Rockefeller laments the 20th century drop in the infant mortality rate and the increase in life expectancy because these have resulted in “over population”. ”The negative impact of population growth on all of our planetary eco-systems is becoming appallingly evident.”

David Attenborough, ”Today we are living in an era where the biggest threat to human well being, to other species and to the earth as we know it might well be ourselves . . . Human population density is [at the root] of every environmental problem that I have encountered [including] the relentless increase in atmospheric pollution [i.e., carbon dioxide].”

In the paper Too Many People: Earth’s Population Problem the group Population Matters wrote, ”At a 1990 per capita emission rate of about four tones of carbon dioxide per person per year, the world's theoretically environmentally optimum population level would not be much higher than two billion, living at an average 1990 lifestyle, in order to stabilize carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere.” ”to reduce climate impacts it helps to reduce the number of climate changers.”

So there you have it.

In the eyes of the advocates of the IPCC’s “climate policy” your children and grandchildren are no longer “human beings”; they are just little “climate changers” and it would have been better for the Earth if they had not been born. What is most unsettling is that your little “climate changers” only have less than a 30% chance of surviving the population reduction that needs to occur to ”stabilize carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere!”

The truly strange thing about the superstitious belief that water vapor causes global warming is that it is contrary to observed reality. Not only do higher levels of humidity bring more abundant and more diverse life to the biosphere, the mean temperature in very humid climates is predictably lower than it is in very arid climates along the same latitude. It is an observed phenomenon that when nature takes the moisture out of the air, either in a desert or during a drought, the mean air temperature goes up—not down! As such “heat waves” are most often associated with droughts rather than with periods of high humidity.

1) The Great North American heatwave of 1936 was brought on by the “Dust Bowl” drought that “came in three waves, 1934, 1936, and 1939–40, but some regions of the High Plains experienced drought conditions for as many as eight years.” “Drought: A Paleo Perspective – 20th Century Drought”, National Climatic Data Center

2) Marble Bar heatwave, 1923-24: “In the summer of 1923-1924 the monsoon stayed further north and no cyclones occurred anywhere in Australia that year, a truly unusual year. During its record-breaking heat wave only 79 mm of rain fell on Marble Bar in the form of 2 brief storms, and only 12 mm of rain fell before the next wet season began in December of 1924. The tropical section of Western Australia experienced a severe drought in 1924, with no cloud cover to relieve the seemingly endless days of extreme heat.” Australia: The Land Where Time Began

All that one has to do to observe this reality is to go outside and take a look at actual, real-world temperature vs. humidity readings:

All of the above graphs were produced by simply looking at publicly available temperature and humidity readings and as you can see the presence of water within a climate system cools it down via well-established and thoroughly studied processes such as latent heat transfer, increased albedo from the increased cloud cover, enhanced intra-atmospheric radiative heat transfer, the cooling affect of precipitation, a lowering of the lapse rate, etc.

For example, northern Arizona where I live has a dry season and a wet season. In June when the humidity is very low the temperature is very high. In July when the “Monsoons” come the humidity goes up sharply. Not only does this result in a marked drop in daily mean temperatures, it also causes the countryside to turn green—a welcome climate change indeed!

Let’s be clear, it is not that water vapor doesn’t cause as much warming of surface-level air temperatures as the “greenhouse effect” hypothesis predicts—it causes zero warming of surface level air temperatures and is actually associated with lower temperatures and quite literally causes deserts to bloom! Why on Earth would the IPCC want to demonize this “water of life” by suggesting that if global humidity levels rise irreparable damage will be done to the biosphere?

The fact is, the only places where water vapor causes a 22-25 °C temperature increase in the global surface-level air temperatures by causing a “greenhouse effect” is within the imagination of certain people, within computer models, within certain peer-reviewed scientific papers and within IPCC Assessment Reports.

In the real world, no such water vapor mediated warming exists (very high confidence).

Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

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Background

This site is in favour of things that ARE good for the environment. That the usual Greenie causes are good for the environment is however disputed. Greenie policies can in fact be actively bad for the environment -- as with biofuels, for instance

This Blog by John Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.), writing from Brisbane, Australia.

I am the most complete atheist you can imagine. I don't believe in Karl Marx, Jesus Christ or global warming. And I also don't believe in the unhealthiness of salt, sugar and fat. How skeptical can you get? If sugar is bad we are all dead

And when it comes to "climate change", I know where the skeletons are buried

There are no forbidden questions in science, no matters too sensitive or delicate to be challenged, no sacred truths.

Context for the minute average temperature change recorded in the graph above: At any given time surface air temperatures around the world range over about 100°C. Even in the same place they can vary by nearly that much seasonally and as much as 30°C or more in a day. A minute rise in average temperature in that context is trivial if it is not meaningless altogether. Scientists are Warmists for the money it brings in, not because of the facts

"Thinking" molecules?? Terrestrial temperatures have gone up by less than one degree over the last 150 years and CO2 has gone up long term too. But that proves nothing. It is not a proven causal relationship. One of the first things you learn in statistics is that correlation is not causation. And there is none of the smooth relationship that you would expect of a causal relationship. Both temperatures and CO2 went up in fits and starts but they were not the same fits and starts. The precise effects on temperature that CO2 levels are supposed to produce were not produced. CO2 molecules don't have a little brain in them that says "I will stop reflecting heat down for a few years and then start up again". Their action (if any) is entirely passive. Theoretically, the effect of added CO2 in the atmosphere should be instant. It allegedly works by bouncing electromagnetic radiation around and electromagnetic radiation moves at the speed of light. But there has been no instant effect. Temperature can stay plateaued for many years (e.g. 1945 to 1975) while CO2 levels climb. So there is clearly no causal link between the two. One could argue that there are one or two things -- mainly volcanoes and the Ninos -- that upset the relationship but there are not exceptions ALL the time. Most of the time a precise 1 to 1 connection should be visible. It isn't, far from it. You should be able to read one from the other. You can't.

Warmists depend heavily on ice cores for their figures about the atmosphere of the past. But measuring the deep past through ice cores is a very shaky enterprise, which almost certainly takes insufficient account of compression effects. The apparently stable CO2 level of 280ppm during the Holocene could in fact be entirely an artifact of compression at the deeper levels of the ice cores. . Perhaps the gas content of an ice layer approaches a low asymptote under pressure. Dr Zbigniew Jaworowski's criticisms of the assumed reliability of ice core measurements are of course well known. And he studied them for over 30 years.

The world's first "Green" party was the Nazi party -- and Greenies are just as Fascist today in their endeavours to dictate to us all and in their attempts to suppress dissent from their claims.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Warmism is a powerful religion that aims to control most of our lives. It is nearly as powerful as the Catholic Church once was

Believing in global warming has become a sign of virtue. Strange in a skeptical era. There is clearly a need for faith

Climate change is the religion of people who think they're too smart for religion

Some advice from the Buddha that the Green/Left would do well to think about: "Three things cannot be long hidden: The Sun, The Moon and The Truth"

Leftists have faith that warming will come back some day. And they mock Christians for believing in the second coming of Christ! They obviously need religion

Global warming has in fact been a religious doctrine for over a century. Even Charles Taze Russell, the founder of Jehovah's Witnesses, believed in it

A rosary for the church of global warming (Formerly the Catholic church): "Hail warming, full of grace, blessed art thou among climates and blessed is the fruit of thy womb panic"

Pope Francis is to the Catholic church what Obama is to America -- a mistake, a fool and a wrecker

Global warming is the predominant Leftist lie of the 21st century. No other lie is so influential. The runner up lie is: "Islam is a religion of peace". Both are rankly absurd.

"When it comes to alarmism, we’re all deniers; when it comes to climate change, none of us are" -- Dick Lindzen

The EPA does everything it can get away with to shaft America and Americans

Cromwell's famous plea: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken" was ignored by those to whom it was addressed -- to their great woe. Warmists too will not consider that they may be wrong ..... "Bowels" was a metaphor for compassion in those days

Inorganic Origin of Petroleum: "The theory of Inorganic Origin of Petroleum (synonyms: abiogenic, abiotic, abyssal, endogenous, juvenile, mineral, primordial) states that petroleum and natural gas was formed by non-biological processes deep in the Earth, crust and mantle. This contradicts the traditional view that the oil would be a "fossil fuel" produced by remnants of ancient organisms. Oil is a hydrocarbon mixture in which a major constituent is methane CH4 (a molecule composed of one carbon atom bonded to four hydrogen atoms). Occurrence of methane is common in Earth's interior and in space. The inorganic theory contrasts with the ideas that posit exhaustion of oil (Peak Oil), which assumes that the oil would be formed from biological processes and thus would occur only in small quantities and sets, tending to exhaust. Some oil drilling now goes 7 miles down, miles below any fossil layers

As the Italian chemist Primo Levi reflected in Auschwitz, carbon is ‘the only element that can bind itself in long stable chains without a great expense of energy, and for life on Earth (the only one we know so far) precisely long chains are required. Therefore carbon is the key element of living substance.’ The chemistry of carbon (2) gives it a unique versatility, not just in the artificial world, but also, and above all, in the animal, vegetable and – speak it loud! – human kingdoms.

David Archibald: "The more carbon dioxide we can put into the atmosphere, the better life on Earth will be for human beings and all other living things."

Fossil fuels are 100% organic, are made with solar energy, and when burned produce mostly CO2 and H2O, the 2 most important foods for life.

Warmists claim that the "hiatus" in global warming that began around 1998 was caused by the oceans suddenly gobbling up all the heat coming from above. Changes in the heat content of the oceans are barely measurable but the ARGO bathythermographs seem to show the oceans warming not from above but from below

(1). “The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness… “The apparent endemicity of bad research behaviour is alarming. In their quest for telling a compelling story, scientists too often sculpt data to fit their preferred theory of the world. Or they retrofit hypotheses to fit their data. Journal editors deserve their fair share of criticism too. We aid and abet the worst behaviours. Our acquiescence to the impact factor fuels an unhealthy competition to win a place in a select few journals. Our love of ‘significance’ pollutes the literature with many a statistical fairy-tale…Journals are not the only miscreants. Universities are in a perpetual struggle for money and talent…” (Dr. Richard Horton, editor-in-chief, The Lancet, in The Lancet, 11 April, 2015, Vol 385, “Offline: What is medicine’s 5 sigma?”)

(2). “It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.” (Dr. Marcia Angell, NY Review of Books, January 15, 2009, “Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption)

Consensus: As Ralph Waldo Emerson said: 'A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.'

Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough - Michael Crichton

Bertrand Russell knew about consensus: "The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.”

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts" – Richard Feynman

"I always think it's a sign of victory when they move on to the ad hominem -- Christopher Hitchens

"The desire to save humanity is always a false front for the urge to rule it" -- H L Mencken

'Nothing is more terrible than ignorance in action' -- Goethe

“Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.” -- Voltaire

Lord Salisbury: "No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome; if you believe theologians, nothing is innocent; if you believe soldiers, nothing is safe."

Calvin Coolidge said, "If you see 10 troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you." He could have been talking about Warmists.

Some advice from long ago for Warmists: "If ifs and ans were pots and pans,there'd be no room for tinkers". It's a nursery rhyme harking back to Middle English times when "an" could mean "if". Tinkers were semi-skilled itinerant workers who fixed holes and handles in pots and pans -- which were valuable household items for most of our history. Warmists are very big on "ifs", mays", "might" etc. But all sorts of things "may" happen, including global cooling

There goes another beautiful theory about to be murdered by a brutal gang of facts. - Duc de La Rochefoucauld, French writer and moralist (1613-1680)

"Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate" -- William of Occam

Was Paracelsus a 16th century libertarian? His motto was: "Alterius non sit qui suus esse potest" which means "Let no man belong to another who can belong to himself." He was certainly a rebel in his rejection of authority and his reliance on observable facts and is as such one of the founders of modern medicine

"In science, refuting an accepted belief is celebrated as an advance in knowledge; in religion it is condemned as heresy". (Bob Parks, Physics, U of Maryland). No prizes for guessing how global warming skepticism is normally responded to.

"Almost all professors of the arts and sciences are egregiously conceited, and derive their happiness from their conceit" -- Erasmus

"The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin." -- Thomas H. Huxley

Time was, people warning the world "Repent - the end is nigh!" were snickered at as fruitcakes. Now they own the media and run the schools.

"One of the sources of the Fascist movement is the desire to avoid a too-rational and too-comfortable world" -- George Orwell, 1943 in Can Socialists Be Happy?

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts -- Bertrand Russell

“Affordable energy in ample quantities is the lifeblood of the industrial societies and a prerequisite for the economic development of the others.” -- John P. Holdren, Science Adviser to President Obama. Published in Science 9 February 2001

The closer science looks at the real world processes involved in climate regulation the more absurd the IPCC's computer driven fairy tale appears. Instead of blithely modeling climate based on hunches and suppositions, climate scientists would be better off abandoning their ivory towers and actually measuring what happens in the real world.' -- Doug L Hoffman

Something no Warmist could take on board: "Knuth once warned a correspondent, "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." -- Prof. Donald Knuth, whom some regard as the world's smartest man

"To be green is to be irrational, misanthropic and morally defective. They are the barbarians at the gate we have to stand against" -- Rich Kozlovich

“We’ve got to ride this global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy.“ – Timothy Wirth,
President of the UN Foundation

“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?” – Maurice Strong, founder of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP)

Leftists generally and Warmists in particular very commonly ascribe disagreement with their ideas to their opponent being "in the pay" of someone else, usually "Big Oil", without troubling themselves to provide any proof of that assertion. They are so certain that they are right that that seems to be the only reasonable explanation for opposition to them. They thus reveal themselves as the ultimate bigots -- people with fixed and rigid ideas.

ABOUT:

This is one of TWO skeptical blogs that I update daily. During my research career as a social scientist, I was appalled at how much writing in my field was scientifically lacking -- and I often said so in detail in the many academic journal articles I had published in that field. I eventually gave up social science research, however, because no data ever seemed to change the views of its practitioners. I hoped that such obtuseness was confined to the social scientists but now that I have shifted my attention to health related science and climate related science, I find the same impermeability to facts and logic. Hence this blog and my FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC blog. I may add that I did not come to either health or environmental research entirely without credentials. I had several academic papers published in both fields during my social science research career

Update: After 8 years of confronting the frankly childish standard of reasoning that pervades the medical journals, I have given up. I have put the blog into hibernation. In extreme cases I may put up here some of the more egregious examples of medical "wisdom" that I encounter. Greenies and food freaks seem to be largely coterminous. My regular bacon & egg breakfasts would certainly offend both -- if only because of the resultant methane output

Since my academic background is in the social sciences, it is reasonable to ask what a social scientist is doing talking about global warming. My view is that my expertise is the most relevant of all. It seems clear to me from what you will see on this blog that belief in global warming is very poorly explained by history, chemistry, physics or statistics.

Warmism is prophecy, not science. Science cannot foretell the future. Science can make very accurate predictions based on known regularities in nature (e.g. predicting the orbits of the inner planets) but Warmism is the exact opposite of that. It predicts a DEPARTURE from the known regularities of nature. If we go by the regularities of nature, we are on the brink of an ice age.

And from a philosophy of science viewpoint, far from being "the science", Warmism is not even an attempt at a factual statement, let alone being science. It is not a meaningful statement about the world. Why? Because it is unfalsifiable -- making it a religious, not a scientific statement. To be a scientific statement, there would have to be some conceivable event that disproved it -- but there appears to be none. ANY event is hailed by Warmists as proving their contentions. Only if Warmists were able to specify some fact or event that would disprove their theory would it have any claim to being a scientific statement. So the explanation for Warmist beliefs has to be primarily a psychological and political one -- which makes it my field

And, after all, Al Gore's academic qualifications are in social science also -- albeit very pissant qualifications.

A "geriatric" revolt: The scientists who reject Warmism tend to be OLD! Your present blogger is one of those. There are tremendous pressures to conformity in academe and the generally Leftist orientation of academe tends to pressure everyone within it to agree to ideas that suit the Left. And Warmism is certainly one of those ideas. So old guys are the only ones who can AFFORD to declare the Warmists to be unclothed. They either have their careers well-established (with tenure) or have reached financial independence (retirement) and so can afford to call it like they see it. In general, seniors in society today are not remotely as helpful to younger people as they once were. But their opposition to the Warmist hysteria will one day show that seniors are not completely irrelevant after all. Experience does count (we have seen many such hysterias in the past and we have a broader base of knowledge to call on) and our independence is certainly an enormous strength. Some of us are already dead. (Reid Bryson and John Daly are particularly mourned) and some of us are very senior indeed (e.g. Bill Gray and Vince Gray) but the revolt we have fostered is ever growing so we have not labored in vain.

Jimmy Carter Classic Quote from 1977: "Because we are now running out of gas and oil, we must prepare quickly for a third change, to strict conservation and to the use of coal and permanent renewable energy sources, like solar power.

SOME POINTS TO PONDER:

Today’s environmental movement is the current manifestation of the totalitarian impulse. It is ironic that the same people who condemn the black or brown shirts of the pre WW2 period are blind to the current manifestation simply because the shirts are green.

Climate is just the sum of weather. So if you cannot forecast the weather a month in advance, you will not be able to forecast the climate 50 years in advance. And official meteorologists such as Britain's Met Office and Australia's BOM, are very poor forecasters of weather. The Met office has in fact given up on making seasonal forecasts because they have so often got such forecasts embarrassingly wrong. Their global-warming-powered "models" just did not deliver

Another 97%: Following the death of an older brother in a car crash in 1994, Bashar Al Assad became heir apparent; and after his father died in June 2000, he took office as President of Syria with a startling 97 per cent of the vote.

Hearing a Government Funded Scientist say let me tell you the truth, is like hearing a Used Car Salesman saying let me tell you the truth.

A strange Green/Left conceit: They seem to think (e.g. here) that no-one should spend money opposing them and that conservative donors must not support the election campaigns of Congressmen they agree with

David Brower, founder Sierra Club: “Childbearing should be a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license"

After three exceptionally cold winters in the Northern hemisphere, the Warmists are chanting: "Warming causes cold". Even if we give that a pass for logic, it still inspires the question: "Well, what are we worried about"? Cold is not going to melt the icecaps is it?"

It's a central (but unproven) assumption of the Warmist "models" that clouds cause warming. Odd that it seems to cool the temperature down when clouds appear overhead!

To make out that the essentially trivial warming of the last 150 years poses some sort of threat, Warmists postulate positive feedbacks that might cut in to make the warming accelerate in the near future. Amid their theories about feedbacks, however, they ignore the one feedback that is no theory: The reaction of plants to CO2. Plants gobble up CO2 and the more CO2 there is the more plants will flourish and hence gobble up yet more CO2. And the increasing crop yields of recent years show that plantlife is already flourishing more. The recent rise in CO2 will therefore soon be gobbled up and will no longer be around to bother anyone. Plants provide a huge NEGATIVE feedback in response to increases in atmospheric CO2

Every green plant around us is made out of carbon dioxide that the plant has grabbed out of the atmosphere. That the plant can get its carbon from such a trace gas is one of the miracles of life. It admittedly uses the huge power of the sun to accomplish such a vast filtrative task but the fact that a dumb plant can harness the power of the sun so effectively is also a wonder. We live on a rather improbable planet. If a science fiction writer elsewhere in the universe described a world like ours he might well be ridiculed for making up such an implausible tale.

Greenies are the sand in the gears of modern civilization -- and they intend to be.

The Greenie message is entirely emotional and devoid of all logic. They say that polar ice will melt and cause a big sea-level rise. Yet 91% of the world's glacial ice is in Antarctica, where the average temperature is around minus 40 degrees Celsius. The melting point of ice is zero degrees. So for the ice to melt on any scale the Antarctic temperature would need to rise by around 40 degrees, which NOBODY is predicting. The median Greenie prediction is about 4 degrees. So where is the huge sea level rise going to come from? Mars? And the North polar area is mostly sea ice and melting sea ice does not raise the sea level at all. Yet Warmists constantly hail any sign of Arctic melting. That the melting of floating ice does not raise the water level is known as Archimedes' principle. Archimedes demonstrated it around 2,500 years ago. That Warmists have not yet caught up with that must be just about the most inspissated ignorance imaginable. The whole Warmist scare defies the most basic physics. Yet at the opening of 2011 we find the following unashamed lying by James Hansen: "We will lose all the ice in the polar ice cap in a couple of decades". Sadly, what the Vulgate says in John 1:5 is still only very partially true: "Lux in tenebris lucet". There is still much darkness in the minds of men.

The repeated refusal of Warmist "scientists" to make their raw data available to critics is such a breach of scientific protocol that it amounts to a confession in itself. Note, for instance Phil Jones' Feb 21, 2005 response to Warwick Hughes' request for his raw climate data: "We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?" Looking for things that might be wrong with a given conclusion is of course central to science. But Warmism cannot survive such scrutiny. So even after "Climategate", the secrecy goes on.

Most Greenie causes are at best distractions from real environmental concerns (such as land degradation) and are more motivated by a hatred of people than by any care for the environment

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

‘Global warming’ has become the grand political narrative of the age, replacing Marxism as a dominant force for controlling liberty and human choices. -- Prof. P. Stott

The modern environmental movement arose out of the wreckage of the New Left. They call themselves Green because they're too yellow to admit they're really Reds. So Lenin's birthday was chosen to be the date of Earth Day. Even a moderate politician like Al Gore has been clear as to what is needed. In "Earth in the Balance", he wrote that saving the planet would require a "wrenching transformation of society".

For centuries there was a scientific consensus which said that fire was explained by the release of an invisible element called phlogiston. That theory is universally ridiculed today. Global warming is the new phlogiston. Though, now that we know how deliberate the hoax has been, it might be more accurate to call global warming the New Piltdown Man. The Piltdown hoax took 40 years to unwind. I wonder....

Motives: Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is generally to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Policies: The only underlying theme that makes sense of all Greenie policies is hatred of people. Hatred of other people has been a Greenie theme from way back. In a report titled "The First Global Revolution" (1991, p. 104) published by the "Club of Rome", a Greenie panic outfit, we find the following statement: "In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill.... All these dangers are caused by human intervention... The real enemy, then, is humanity itself." See here for many more examples of prominent Greenies saying how much and how furiously they hate you.

After fighting a 70 year war to destroy red communism we face another life-or-death struggle in the 21st century against green communism.

The conventional wisdom of the day is often spectacularly wrong. The most popular and successful opera of all time is undoubtedly "Carmen" by Georges Bizet. Yet it was much criticized when first performed and the unfortunate Bizet died believing that it was a flop. Similarly, when the most iconic piece of 20th century music was first performed in 1913-- Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" -- half the audience walked out. Those of us who defy the conventional wisdom about climate are actually better off than that. Unlike Bizet and Stravinsky in 1913, we KNOW that we will eventually be vindicated -- because all that supports Warmism is a crumbling edifice of guesswork ("models").

Al Gore won a political prize for an alleged work of science. That rather speaks for itself, doesn't it?

Jim Hansen and his twin

Getting rich and famous through alarmism: Al Gore is well-known but note also James Hansen. He has for decades been a senior, presumably well-paid, employee at NASA. In 2001 he was the recipient of a $250,000 Heinz Award. In 2007 Time magazine designated him a Hero of the Environment. That same year he pocketed one-third of a $1 million Dan David Prize. In 2008, the American Association for the Advancement of Science presented him with its Scientific Freedom and Responsibility Award. In 2010 he landed a $100,000 Sophie Prize. He pulled in a total of $1.2 million in 2010. Not bad for a government bureaucrat.

See the original global Warmist in action here: "The icecaps are melting and all world is drowning to wash away the sin"

I am not a global warming skeptic nor am I a global warming denier. I am a global warming atheist. I don't believe one bit of it. That the earth's climate changes is undeniable. Only ignoramuses believe that climate stability is normal. But I see NO evidence to say that mankind has had anything to do with any of the changes observed -- and much evidence against that claim.

Seeing that we are all made of carbon, the time will come when people will look back on the carbon phobia of the early 21st century as too incredible to be believed

Meanwhile, however, let me venture a tentative prophecy. Prophecies are almost always wrong but here goes: Given the common hatred of carbon (Warmists) and salt (Food freaks) and given the fact that we are all made of carbon, salt, water and calcium (with a few additives), I am going to prophecy that at some time in the future a hatred of nitrogen will emerge. Why? Because most of the air that we breathe is nitrogen. We live at the bottom of a nitrogen sea. Logical to hate nitrogen? NO. But probable: Maybe. The Green/Left is mad enough. After all, nitrogen is a CHEMICAL -- and we can't have that!

The intellectual Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (AD 121-180) must have foreseen Global Warmism. He said: "The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."

The Holy Grail for most scientists is not truth but research grants. And the global warming scare has produced a huge downpour of money for research. Any mystery why so many scientists claim some belief in global warming?

For many people, global warming seems to have taken the place of "The Jews" -- a convenient but false explanation for any disliked event. Prof. Brignell has some examples.

Global warming skeptics are real party-poopers. It's so wonderful to believe that you have a mission to save the world.

There is an "ascetic instinct" (or perhaps a "survivalist instinct") in many people that causes them to delight in going without material comforts. Monasteries and nunneries were once full of such people -- with the Byzantine stylites perhaps the most striking example. Many Greenies (other than Al Gore and his Hollywood pals) have that instinct too but in the absence of strong orthodox religious committments they have to convince themselves that the world NEEDS them to live in an ascetic way. So their personal emotional needs lead them to press on us all a delusional belief that the planet needs "saving".

The claim that oil is a fossil fuel is another great myth and folly of the age. They are now finding oil at around seven MILES beneath the sea bed -- which is incomparably further down than any known fossil. The abiotic oil theory is not as yet well enough developed to generate useful predictions but that is also true of fossil fuel theory

Medieval Warm Period: Recent climatological data assembled from around the world using different proxies attest to the presence of both the MWP and the LIA in the following locations: the Sargasso Sea, West Africa, Kenya, Peru, Japan, Tasmania, South Africa, Idaho, Argentina, and California. These events were clearly world-wide and in most locations the peak temperatures during the MWP were higher than current temperatures.

Both radioactive and stable carbon isotopes show that the real atmospheric CO2 residence time (lifetime) is only about 5 years, and that the amount of fossil-fuel CO2 in the atmosphere is
maximum 4%.

How 'GREEN' is the FOOTPRINT of a WIND TURBINE? 45 tons of rebar and 630 cubic yards of concrete

Green/Left denial of the facts explained: "Rejection lies in this, that when the light came into the world men preferred darkness to light; preferred it, because their doings were evil. Anyone who acts shamefully hates the light, will not come into the light, for fear that his doings will be found out. Whereas the man whose life is true comes to the light" John 3:19-21 (Knox)

Against the long history of huge temperature variation in the earth's climate (ice ages etc.), the .6 of one degree average rise reported by the U.N. "experts" for the entire 20th century (a rise so small that you would not be able to detect such a difference personally without instruments) shows, if anything, that the 20th century was a time of exceptional temperature stability.

Recent NASA figures tell us that there was NO warming trend in the USA during the 20th century. If global warming is occurring, how come it forgot the USA?

Warmists say that the revised NASA figures do not matter because they cover only the USA -- and the rest of the world is warming nicely. But it is not. There has NEVER been any evidence that the Southern hemisphere is warming. See here. So the warming pattern sure is looking moth-eaten.

The latest scare is the possible effect of extra CO2 on the world’s oceans, because more CO2 lowers the pH of seawater. While it is claimed that this makes the water more acidic, this is misleading. Since seawater has a pH around 8.1, it will take an awful lot of CO2 it to even make the water neutral (pH=7), let alone acidic (pH less than 7).

In fact, ocean acidification is a scientific impossibility. Henry's Law mandates that warming oceans will outgas CO2 to the atmosphere (as the UN's own documents predict it will), making the oceans less acid. Also, more CO2 would increase calcification rates. No comprehensive, reliable measurement of worldwide oceanic acid/base balance has ever been carried out: therefore, there is no observational basis for the computer models' guess that acidification of 0.1 pH units has occurred in recent decades.

The chaos theory people have told us for years that the air movement from a single butterfly's wing in Brazil can cause an unforeseen change in our weather here. Now we are told that climate experts can "model" the input of zillions of such incalculable variables over periods of decades to accurately forecast global warming 50 years hence. Give us all a break!

Scientists have politics too -- sometimes extreme politics. Read this: "This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism... I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. In such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion. A planned economy, which adjusts production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child." -- Albert Einstein

The Lockwood & Froehlich paper was designed to rebut Durkin's "Great Global Warming Swindle" film. It is a rather confused paper -- acknowledging yet failing to account fully for the damping effect of the oceans, for instance -- but it is nonetheless valuable to climate atheists. The concession from a Greenie source that fluctuations in the output of the sun have driven climate change for all but the last 20 years (See the first sentence of the paper) really is invaluable. And the basic fact presented in the paper -- that solar output has in general been on the downturn in recent years -- is also amusing to see. Surely even a crazed Greenie mind must see that the sun's influence has not stopped and that reduced solar output will soon start COOLING the earth! Unprecedented July 2007 cold weather throughout the Southern hemisphere might even have been the first sign that the cooling is happening. And the fact that warming plateaued in 1998 is also a good sign that we are moving into a cooling phase. As is so often the case, the Greenies have got the danger exactly backwards. See my post of 7.14.07 and very detailed critiques here and here and here for more on the Lockwood paper and its weaknesses.

As the Greenies are now learning, even strong statistical correlations may disappear if a longer time series is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre’s yield of cotton. He calculated the correla­tion coefficient between the two series at –0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic condi­tions and lynchings in Raper’s data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his anal­ysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic condi­tions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added." So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. In the Greenie case, the correlation between CO2 rise and global temperature rise stopped in 1998 -- but that could have been foreseen if measurements taken in the first half of the 20th century had been considered.

Greenie-approved sources of electricity (windmills and solar cells) require heavy government subsidies to be competitive with normal electricity generators so a Dutch word for Greenie power seems graphic to me: "subsidieslurpers" (subsidy gobblers)

Many newspaper articles are reproduced in full on this blog despite copyright claims attached to them. I believe that such reproductions here are protected by the "fair use" provisions of copyright law. Fair use is a legal doctrine that recognises that the monopoly rights protected by copyright laws are not absolute. The doctrine holds that, when someone uses a creative work in way that does not hurt the market for the original work and advances a public purpose - such as education or scholarship - it might be considered "fair" and not infringing.

There are also two blogspot blogs which record what I think are my main recent articles here and here. Similar content can be more conveniently accessed via my subject-indexed list of short articles here or here (I rarely write long articles these days)

NOTE: The archives provided by blogspot below are rather inconvenient. They break each month up into small bits. If you want to scan whole months at a time, the backup archives will suit better. See here or here .....